May 15th, 2020 
Jackson Murphy 
Last May, I interviewed longtime TV writer Chuck Tatham (Full House, Modern Family) about a network sitcom he wrote on called Back To You. It aired on FOX during the Writers’ Strike 2007-2008 season and starred Kelsey Grammer, Patricia Heaton, Ty Burrell, Fred Willard and, at that time, a relatively unknown Josh Gad.
Tatham is now is a consulting producer on the new AppleTV+ animated series Central Park (premiering Friday May 29th), which stars and is co-created by Gad. Tatham, who’s also the writer of the third episode, told me about how he got involved with the show.
“I think I read about it in the trades or heard about it somehow. I’m a big New York-phile. I have a little apartment scant feet above Central Park that we visit a lot. I contacted Josh. I said, ‘Joshua, what’s the story?’ He said, ‘Oh, you wanna be involved?! Oh my gosh! Let’s… Come on!’ The idea of being back in bed with Josh was very exciting because I was absolutely over the moon when I met him on Back to You. He was not just a supremely talented guy… I could tell he was gonna be a big deal. He’s just a lovely gentleman.”
At the time (May ’19), Tatham and the rest of the team, including co-creator Loren Bouchard (Bob’s Burgers) were just wrapping-up production on Season 1 of Central Park. There will be a Season 2.
“Josh plays the busker/narrator of the story. And it’s sort of the story between… if you remember Leona Helmsley, the hotelier sort of evil woman of the ‘80s who was buying property and acting up in New York City… there is a character not unlike Leona Helmsley in this who has nefarious plans for Central Park and Josh’s character and the people who are in Central Park. [They’re] voiced by Leslie Odom, Jr. and Daveed Diggs and Kristen Bell, etc. They’re defending the park against this woman, who is voiced hilariously by Stanley Tucci.”
“He’s unbelievable. The first table read… just his presence and his timing and his voice over the speakerphone just had us rolling in the aisles. I worked on a show called Baby Blues briefly many years ago, but this is basically the first time I’ve ventured into animation.”
Fast-forward a year and Central Park is finally ready to be unveiled. I’ve screened the first four episodes, which are filled with cleverly crafted stories, smart humor and fantastic, full-length original songs. I recently had the chance to talk with two of the stars – Odom, Jr. (Hamilton) and Tituss Burgess (Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt) about the music and performing these numbers.
“It’s lovely to know that we had Loren, and he assembled a wonderful lineup of other composers to write music for all the episodes,” Burgess said. “But it’s nice to know that when you go to work, when you’re getting a song, it’s gonna be good even if you haven’t heard it. It’s so satisfying. When you’re in a musical, like on Broadway, it’s a mixed bag of composers. Sometimes it’s not so great. But it wasn’t the case with this. Every song I sang was wonderful. Truly.”
“Also… there’s no limits in animation,” Odom, Jr. said. “You’re not bound by the limits of physics or even the limits of your own specificality. It is as wild, as outrageous, as ridiculous, as silly as you can make it. You don’t have to be natural or even honest. You can just be wacky from time to time, which is a lot of fun, man.”
“Central Park” will debut with the first two episodes on May 29, followed by a new episode each week, on AppleTV+.
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